An Exclusive Interview with Ankit Prasad, Founder and CEO, Bobble AI

Bobble AI offers a portfolio of smartphone Bobble Indic Keyboards for better conversation

Artificial intelligence has enhanced the power of conversation in society with its smart functionalities through chatbots, NLP, Conversation AI, and so on. Companies can reach a wider target audience— regional, national, as well as international with the language tech. Ai models are in high demand for serving customers across the world without any miscommunication.

This is an exclusive interview with Ankit Prasad, Founder and CEO, Bobble AI, who explains how their company leverages artificial intelligence to offer a conversation media platform through Bobble Indic Keyboards.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Bobble AI is India's leading conversation media platform empowering everyday conversations of over 65 million smartphone users globally through its flagship innovations in areas of AI-powered keyboard-tech, content-tech, and language-tech. With its diverse portfolio of smartphone keyboard applications supporting more than 100 global and vernacular languages, Bobble AI is rapidly expanding its footprint across APAC, specifically Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.  Driven by a mission to enhance daily smartphone conversations while at the same time empowering businesses to understand their users in greater depth, Bobble AI's business offerings span across conversation media marketing, programmatic advertising, market intelligence, and conversational tech solutions.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

The mission for the Bobble AI team has always been to enhance the smartphone conversation experience making it smart, localised, expressive, and engaging. It has made it possible by innovating around conversation techs such as languages, typing, voice, content, and camera. That is the reason why keyboards have the highest engagement (100+ daily sessions and over 30 minutes spent daily), retention (82% Day 90 cohort, and rating (4.6 stars) by end consumers.

In 2015, Bobble was launched as a user-generated content app; wherein 2016, a Keyboard extension was added into the app; in 2017, Bobble Keyboard was renamed to Bobble Indic Keyboard and all Indic languages were launched inside keyboard; in 2018, the management renamed the company's core brand to Bobble AI instead of Bobble, since it had revamped all traditional algorithms into AI-powered algorithms; 2019 distribution partnerships with OEMs and telcos begun; 2020 revenue streams were launched and related strategic partnerships took place.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

Bobble Indic Keyboard (supporting 36+ Indic languages), the flagship product of the company, and Bharat Keyboards in Bangla, Marathi, and Malayalam— have the potential to revolutionize the usage of the vernacular languages. Communication patterns in regional societies affect the consumer behavior of around 536 million internet users from India who primarily rely on Indic languages. Bobble's Indic Keyboard is regarded as the highest-rated, most engaging, and retaining keyboard in the world, surpassing Google's Gboard and Microsoft's Swiftkey. The company has created the powerful Mint Keyboard which is the default keyboard of Xiaomi phones.

Given the strength in smartphone conversations, the company has come up with three B2B business models that are revolutionizing the digital advertising, marketing, and customer engagement landscape –

(i)Conversation Data Intelligence: Digital service providers are leveraging Bobble AI's unique and powerful data intelligence capabilities to gain their market insights and competitive intelligence while activating those insights to marketing campaigns increasing efficiency by 3X.

(ii)Conversation Media Marketing: Brands who leveraged conversation media marketing have achieved a lift in brand awareness by 25% and a lift in purchase intent by 20%, with millions of people sharing their branded content amongst their friends and family members over WhatsApp.

(iii)Conversation Tech Solutions:  Digital service providers are using Bobble AI's conversational tech such as API integration into the keyboard as a distribution channel, regional content APIs, language support, voice support, etc. to increase their customer engagement, transactions, and retention.

Bobble AI keyboards have revolutionised the way users have been using their smartphones until now.

AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

Artificial intelligence is the backbone of product offerings and that adds real value to the user's experience on the platform as AI-powered contextual content prediction is one of the core USPs that sets the brand apart from other keyboard apps. It crunches user data before invention and creation to grasp the subtleties of user behaviour. The conversational AI technology, including chatbots, language technology, and vernacular content technology, is gaining traction to deliver a more personalized experience and build brand-customer interactions. This quality distinguishes the brand from the competition, making it the best-rated keyboard in the world.

What is the most popular media interface among the users?

The keyboard is perhaps the most popular media interface among users. The flagship product, the Bobble Indic Keyboard, supports over 36 Indian languages and Bharat Keyboards in Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, and Malayalam, has the potential to revolutionize the use of vernacular languages influencing the consumer behaviour of India's 536 million internet users who rely on Indic languages.

What is your view are the Growing industry trends w.r.t BFSI, regional language conversation, etc.?

The BFSI segment is always looking to enhance user experience through new and improved technology-backed features and innovations. There is an increasing demand for easy, seamless, and on-the-go consumption of banking, finance, and investment-related services. To this effect, Bobble AI offers AI-powered conversational banking solutions to banks and fintech. By leveraging the power of smart keyboards, banks and fintech can make all banking and financial services available to their customers across smartphone usage, thereby making banking very fast, intuitive, and hassle-free. Custom keyboard solutions that offer higher customer engagement, greater monetization opportunities, and a 360-degree view of customer behaviour, are definitely the greatest industry trend in this segment with an increasing number of global banks adopting it.

With regards to regional language conversations, the team believes the potential is exponential. It has expanded its product portfolio to include vernacular language keyboards because of increasing demand from users to use the smartphone in their native language and not be left out of the mobile ecosystem due to language barriers.  People want to chat in their own language and feel like they belong to a tech-enabled community. It is empowering these individuals who cannot use smartphones supporting majorly English to leverage everything that the digital realm has to offer.

How are your tech solutions addressing today's market needs? Can you please throw light in this regard?

All consumer-facing technologies are centered on smartphone conversations, in order to make them more expressive, localized, and smart. There are billions of conversations happening on smartphones every day, it deserves to be improved. Bobble AI innovates around conversation-tech such as languages, typing, voice, content, and camera. All the innovations are bundled into a smartphone keyboard that serves as the delivery channel for the team. One can try out the portfolio of keyboards here –Bobble AI Keyboards and Bharat Keyboards.

Today, the team supports more than 130 languages including all 23 official Indic languages and their macaronic versions, over 50 Indonesian languages, and other major languages in the world. 80% of these languages have more than 10M native users. There are multiple ways people prefer to type, some use two hands typing, some do single-hand typing, some prefer to swipe instead, and others prefer voice to text; all such typing layouts are built into the keyboard, and users can choose as per their convenience. In order to assist users' typing experience and make it fast and error-free, the company offers auto-correct, word prediction, and smart compose. All such typing features are available in over 130 languages.

The team believes conversations are incomplete without visual expression and therefore keyboard comes packed with more than 10 million stickers, GIFs, and emojis with regional context. The best part is a majority of this conversational content carries users' own face, their own expressions, accessories, and their custom message.

The keyboard comes pre-bundled with a smart and expressive camera that uses augmented reality to facilitate the creation and sharing of live GIFs. Bobble AI has witnessed an ever-increasing usage pattern for voice-to-text features, where it was 5% of DAU (Daily Active Users) three years ago, today it has grown to 15% of DAU.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback.

I was recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia as Founders, me and Rahul Prasadwere recognised under Fortune 40 Under 40 list. Bobble AI was recognized by Entrepreneur India Top 25 Tech companies from India in 2021. Ankit Prasad also won BW TechTors Award 2021 and got featured among Top Daring CEOs by Entrepreneur India. The team won Gold in Conversation Marketing category for Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk campaign under Agency Reporter Front Benchers awards 2021 with Gold in AdTech category for Happydent campaign under Agency Reporter Front Benchers awards 2021.

What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

We have so many upcoming projects coming this year. When it comes to talking about product and technology, there are a series of features in the pipeline – (i) Animated Bobble stories with multiple bobble heads and sound for easy sharing into social media stories, (ii) Statistics and gamification around keyboard usage (e.g. typing speed, accuracy, minutes spoken, length swiped, etc.) where one can compete and play with their friends, (iii) Facilitating end-to-end transactions (be it shopping, cab booking, food ordering, gaming, etc.) right from a keyboard aiding the conversation experience on WhatsApp, i.e. imagine Bobble as a "Super Keyboard". The team is already talking to some of the large digital players for their service integrations via API.

Whereas on the business side, the team is expanding its horizon by putting a lot of effort into aggressive business development around all business verticals including conversation media marketing, conversation data intelligence, and conversational tech solutions. It is the only platform that has the potential to translate the idea of Super App in India with a 65 million diverse user base and highly engaging technology interface. We are all anticipating a bright future for both the customers and the company.